Investigation of Ultimate Strength of Deck Slabs in Steel-Concrete Bridges

In the last 50 years, many bridges have been built as composite structures with decks of reinforced concrete that are supported by longitudinal steel beams. The presence of the longitudinal steel beams and the unloaded area of concrete slab cause the loaded deck slabs to be restrained against lateral expansion. As a result, a compressive membrane thrust is developed. In experimental tests, the authors built a series of one-third scale steel-concrete composite bridge models with several varying structural parameters, including concrete compressive strength, reinforcement percentage, and the size of steel supporting beams. After comparing the results of different models, the influence of these structural parameters on the amount of compressive membrane action in the deck slab was evaluated. Furthermore, the improvement of an existing theoretical model provided accurate predictions for the loading-carrying capacities.

Ultimate compressive strength of cold-formed steel angle struts loaded through a single bolt

This paper presents design recommendations for the strength of cold-formed steel angle structs. The work was part funded by the Carnegie Trust and is co-authored by academics from Hong-Kong University. The work has led to a collaboration with the University of Malaya, attempting to predict the strength using artificial neural networks.

How trophic interaction strength depends on traits

A key problem in community ecology is to understand how individual-level traits give rise to population-level trophic interactions. Here, we propose a synthetic framework based on ecological considerations to address this question systematically. We derive a general functional form for the dependence of trophic interaction coefficients on trophically relevant quantitative traits of consumers and resources. The derived expression encompasses-and thus allows a unified comparison of-several functional forms previously proposed in the literature. Furthermore, we show how a community's, potentially low-dimensional, effective trophic niche space is related to its higher-dimensional phenotypic trait space. In this manner, we give ecological meaning to the notion of the "dimensionality of trophic niche space." Our framework implies a method for directly measuring this dimensionality. We suggest a procedure for estimating the relevant parameters from empirical data and for verifying that such data matches the assumptions underlying our derivation. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.


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Interfacial shear strength and tensile properties of injection-molded, short- and long-glass fiber-reinforced polyamide 6,6 composites

Injection-molded short- and long-glass fiber/polyamide 6,6 composites were subjected to tensile tests. To measure the effectiveness of the fibers in reinforcing the composites, a computational approach was employed to compute the fiber– matrix ISS, orientation factor, reinforcement efficiency, tensile-, and fiber length-related properties. Although the LFCs showed great improvement in fiber characteristics compared to the SFCs, enhancement in tensile properties was small, which is believed to be due to the larger fiber diameter. Kelly–Tyson model provides good approximation for the computation of ISS and tensile-related properties.

Effect of column base strength on steel portal frames in fire

This paper presents the findings of a project part sponsored by an ICE Research and Development grant on portal frames in fire. The research reported here has also lead to a sucessful research grant from the IStructE. The paper describes a non-linear elasto plastic dynamic finite element model that captures the collapse of a portal frame in fire. It demonstrates that current guidance on the column base stiffness and strength, to prevent collapse, may in some cases be unconservative.

Temperature, predator-prey interaction strength and population stability

Warming could strongly stabilize or destabilize populations and food webs by changing the interaction strengths between predators and their prey. Predicting the consequences of warming requires understanding how temperature affects ingestion (energy gain) and metabolism (energy loss). Here, we studied the temperature dependence of metabolism and ingestion in laboratory experiments with terrestrial arthropods (beetles and spiders). From this data, we calculated ingestion efficiencies (ingestion/metabolism) and per capita interaction strengths in the short and long term. Additionally, we investigated if and how body mass changes these temperature dependencies. For both predator groups, warming increased metabolic rates substantially, whereas temperature effects on ingestion rates were weak. Accordingly, the ingestion efficiency (the ratio of ingestion to metabolism) decreased in all treatments. This result has two possible consequences: on the one hand, it suggests that warming of natural ecosystems could increase intrinsic population stability, meaning less fluctuations in population density; on the other hand, decreasing ingestion efficiencies may also lead to higher extinction risks because of starvation. Additionally, predicted long-term per capita interaction strengths decreased with warming, which suggests an increase in perturbation stability of populations, i.e., a higher probability of returning to the same equilibrium density after a small perturbation. Together, these results suggest that warming has complex and potentially profound effects on predator-prey interactions and food-web stability.

Interaction strength, food web topology and the relative importance of species in food webs

P>1. We established complex marine communities, consisting of over 100 species, in large subtidal experimental mesocosms. We measured the strength of direct interactions and the net strength of direct and indirect interactions between the species in those communities, using a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches.

Received signal strength in large-scale wireless relay sensor network: a stochastic ray approach

The authors consider a point percolation lattice representation of a large-scale wireless relay sensor network (WRSN) deployed in a cluttered environment. Each relay sensor corresponds to a grid point in the random lattice and the signal sent by the source is modelled as an ensemble of photons that spread in the space, which may 'hit' other sensors and are 'scattered' around. At each hit, the relay node forwards the received signal to its nearest neighbour through direction-selective relaying. The authors first derive the distribution that a relay path reaches a prescribed location after undergoing certain number of hops. Subsequently, a closed-form expression of the average received signal strength (RSS) at the destination can be computed as the summation of all signal echoes' energy. Finally, the effect of the anomalous diffusion exponent ß on the mean RSS in a WRSN is studied, for which it is found that the RSS scaling exponent e is given by (3ß-1)/ß. The results would provide useful insight into the design and deployment of large-scale WRSNs in future. © 2011 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.